His response was a look of insolent bemusement, so I had to remind him of what he’d told me about living life to the maximum: ‘Picking up women at the club. Remember?’
‘Totally different,’ he said.
‘Is that so?’
‘Two reasons,’ he went on, jabbing a forefinger upwards to emphasise point number one. ‘A: I was off my head at the time, like I told you. And B:’ – thrusting out a second finger – ‘I never two-timed anybody. I was always straight. They knew what it was about. But you weren’t straight. That’s the thing. You made promises. You took advantage,’ he said. He folded his arms and regarded me with doltish self-righteousness.
‘This is ludicrous,’ I told him. ‘You don’t have any idea. What promises? There weren’t any promises.’
‘You know I’m right,’ he replied, training his eyes on mine, unblinking.
Both oppressive and stupid, his gaze was impossible to bear. I stepped away and leaned on the tree trunk; affecting composure, I shook my head as I surveyed the park. ‘I know what happened,’ I said. ‘You don’t. I’m not going to discuss it.’
‘You took advantage,’ he repeated.
‘I did not take advantage.’
‘You didn’t treat her with respect,’ he stated tonelessly.
‘We were both selfish, we were both thoughtless, we were both culpable.’
‘She was younger than you. She was at a disadvantage.’
‘She was as much in charge of the situation as I was. It was Sarah who ended it, and she was right to end it. She decided she didn’t want to see me again. She took that decision and she stuck to it. It was her decision. I regret what happened, deeply. But Sarah wasn’t deceived. Only one person was deceived, and she wasn’t Sarah.’
‘Her decision, was it?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘That simple, eh? Make a decision, move on. Just like that?’ His hand made a fluttering gesture, mimicking a wispy object borne away on the breeze, while his eyes narrowed with loathing.
‘There’s no point in continuing with this,’ I said.
‘Why do you think you never heard from her?’ he continued. ‘Why do you think that was?’
‘She wanted to be rid of me. You said so yourself.’
‘I’ll tell you why,’ he said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘She couldn’t stand it. It was too much for her. That’s why. She loved you, and you broke her heart. That’s what you did. And she didn’t recover, not for years. That’s the truth. So don’t talk to me about messing up your life, mate – you ruined hers.’ Again he crossed his arms and looked at me steadily, tilting his head so that the glowering eyes were partly obscured by his eyebrows.
A woman was coming towards us, throwing a ball for her dog to retrieve; a short distance behind her, a man was striding up the hill with a pink-clad girl on his shoulders. Feeling safer for their presence, I told Sam that he was a truly extraordinary individual.
‘Thank you,’ he said, modestly accepting a compliment.
‘You behave like a pig to my staff; you post disgusting photos through my letterbox; you take it upon yourself to disrupt our lives; yet you somehow think you’re in a position to accuse me of having no respect?’
‘That’s right,’ he said, with a small complacent nod, as if, rather than accusing him of grotesque hypocrisy, I’d been paraphrasing a notion of such subtlety that only now was I approaching a comprehension of it. ‘And you had no respect for me, either,’ he added.
‘I can’t see what you’ve done to deserve respect,’ I told him.
‘Right from the word go, you had no respect,’ he said. ‘The way you looked at me, the way you spoke to me. I’d hardly opened my mouth and you’d judged me. I could tell. Like a fucking book, your face was. I hadn’t done anything, and you’d judged me.’
‘I judged you?’ I almost shrieked. ‘I judged you? That’s rich, coming from you, the self-appointed judge and jury. Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Could ask you the same thing. You didn’t know me from fucking Adam, but you had me pigeonholed in five seconds flat,’ he said loudly, though the man and the girl were near enough to hear him.
‘But I did know you from Adam. You’d been intimidating my staff. I knew that much about you.’
‘“My staff”,’ he echoed, with mocking pomposity. ‘Just listen to yourself, will you? Lord of the fucking manor and his peasants.’
‘They work for my company. Therefore they are my staff. And you’d been intimidating them.’
‘Not true.’
‘Yes, you had. You were aggressive. My manager at Tottenham Court Road – you threatened him.’
‘Yeah, well – that streak of piss would feel threatened by his own fucking shadow,’ he said. He smirked, pleased with his own wit. The man and the girl now crossed his line of sight, and he waved to them: ‘Hi, Gaz,’ he called out, instantaneously assuming a smile of expansive affability. He received a wave from the girl and her father. ‘The client,’ he explained. ‘Nice chap. Very nice chap.’ He watched them disappear over the hill, then turned back to me, blinking rapidly as if coming out of a daydream. ‘I’m sorry – you were about to say?’
I felt an urge to break something on his head. Instead I repeated that I wanted an explanation from him.
‘This is getting very, very boring,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘You’ve had your explanation.’
‘No I haven’t.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you’ve run out of time. The folks need their kitchen built. Got to earn my wages.’
I told him once more that he’d done great harm to Aileen, and I could see no sense in what he’d done.
‘We’ve covered this already. I said sorry. I’ll say it again if you like: sorry,’ he said, with not a grain of true apology. He stood squarely in front of me and stooped a little to bring his face to the level of mine. ‘She’ll get over it,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll both get over it. Life goes on.’ This banality was imparted as though it were the considered distillation of a lifetime of experience and thought; he started to walk away. It was insufferable, and in a spasm of rage I kicked out at the tree trunk. Sam paused: he looked at me, at my foot, at the spot where I’d kicked the tree, then his gaze travelled slowly back from tree to foot to face, and a smirk appeared. He straightened his back and drew his head back a little, as if the few extra inches were necessary to bring this remarkable scene into perfect focus. ‘Well, well, well,’ he commented. ‘Woken you up, haven’t I?’ He might have been a sergeant addressing a formerly hapless squaddie who had at last shown some fighting spirit. His arrogance made me speechless; I was enraged with him, and dismayed with myself, for having allowed him to make me so angry. It was exciting too, being this angry – and demeaning. I wanted to be elsewhere, immediately. He took a couple of steps towards me, to pat me on the shoulder. ‘I have to go, OK?’ he said. ‘I’d love to stay and chat some more, but an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, and all that.’
Very calmly, looking him in the eye, I said: ‘I hope this is the last time I ever see you.’
‘And I hope so too. I really do,’ he answered, and he smiled a sad, philosophical smile – the sort of smile with which you might bring a long and once close relationship to an end. Water gleamed for a moment in one of his eyes. ‘I should have taken the money. That’s what I should have done,’ he said, as easily as saying: ‘I should have put on a warmer jacket.’ He let out a loud crack of a laugh. ‘Just joking,’ he assured me, delivering a last pat on the shoulder before loping off down the slope. As he went into the shade of the trees at the bottom, he raised a hand to the side of his head, without turning round, as though batting away a fly.
Too agitated to drive, I stayed in the park for a while, walking aimlessly, and in my mind – despite myself – I continued to argue with him. I couldn’t go home until I had found proof that his accusation against me was false. No proof was immediately forthcoming. I walked through the town, trying to dr
edge up evidence in my favour, and after an hour or so I had some. I saw Sarah pummelling the bed in frustration at what she said was her weakness, accusing me of not caring for her as much as she cared for me. It was raining heavily; she was wearing a shirt that had belonged to her father, a blue-striped shirt with tails that reached to her knees. ‘I love you,’ she said, and what she meant by this was that I owed her something in return. In tears, she told me that she loved me, and I understood that to stop her crying I had to say the same words, but I didn’t – not then, nor at any other time. By then I had come to wonder if what she needed above all was for me to be fascinated by her – or merely to tell her that I was.
Her volatility had seemed, at times, unspontaneous. One evening she’d thrown a full glass across the room, but had reached for the farther glass (water) rather than the nearer (wine), and had aimed precisely for the fireplace. Then again, there were times when a sudden change of mood seemed to overcome her. At the door one evening, she hurled herself at me and was as happy as I ever saw her; within the hour, slumped in a corner of the room, she was telling me: ‘I can’t go on with this – it’s pathetic.’ In bed she could be frantic, as if the purpose of it were to render herself senseless and I was nothing but the means to oblivion; but I recalled, too, something of the delicacy of her kiss, and the gleefulness of her laugh. And I recalled the revulsion with which she had dismissed me for the last time; she wasn’t distraught. She was younger than I was, it was true, but she was a twenty-four-year-old woman, not a teenager – and her age had its advantages as well. I pictured her, absolutely sure of her attractiveness, showing me the photos of herself. But perhaps this first step had been prompted by some signs of interest from me? It seemed likely, but I no longer knew what I’d done. I was sure, however, that Sam’s accusation was groundless, and the idea that Sarah would have been bereft at the end of our affair was incredible. And yet, even though I suspected that this was Sam’s intention, I felt some responsibility for what had happened to her. Her breakdown, of course, might not have happened: it might have been nothing more than one of Sam’s stories. And if it were true, her collapse could not have been my fault, or would have been mine only to a limited extent, unless the child had been mine, which I had never believed. Nonetheless, there was this taint on my mind. It was like a conspiracy theory that you know – when you think about it – is ridiculous, but which you cannot categorically dismiss, once you’ve heard it.
20
Aileen and I went to Petra, as planned. We were there for five or six hours, and for most of the time we explored the ruins independently of each other. At one point I saw her dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. She was moved by what she was seeing, she said, but I knew this wasn’t the explanation. It was something of a shock, after so many months, to see her upset like that.
Soon after we came back home, I was allowed to return to our bed. This was not a major gesture of renewed intimacy. It was rather that we were going to find out if it might be possible to continue our day-to-day lives as before, at least in form, and our day-to-day lives had previously entailed sleeping together. It proved impossible for us to sleep in the same bed. I’d taken to grinding my teeth, Aileen told me. The snoring was worse as well. So I removed myself to the guest room again. It was not as if we were newlyweds, as Aileen said; many people of our age have a similar arrangement. Aileen felt fresher in the mornings than she had done in years, she told me, more than once.
Our marriage was reduced. It would have been better had the truth not been uncovered. But Aileen had forgiven me, she said. As she once put it, the affair happened three decades ago, and even if you kill someone you usually get released before thirty years are up. And she could see that my reasons for staying silent about Sam were not wholly self-interested; she might even have done the same herself, in such a situation, she said, though we both knew that for Aileen such a situation could never have arisen. I had been judged leniently, but there is necessarily a distance in the act of judgement, and that distance cannot be closed. I was always aware of having been forgiven, of being indebted to her, and I did not, I have to admit, find it easy to live in debt. Nothing in the way Aileen conducted herself, in the way she talked to me or looked at me, was intended to impress upon me the magnanimity she had shown in trying to overlook my lapse, and rarely did I detect in her face or in her manner even as much as a hint of a consciousness of the superiority of her virtue. Two or three times in the course of a year, no more, she referred to what I did. But I was always conscious that our lives were continuing as they did because of her decision not to punish me. The balance of our marriage was changed.
There was something else. Some of my guilt was felt on behalf of a man I no longer was, and had not been for a very long time, but some of it was entirely mine, because Aileen had forgiven me without knowing the extent of my deceit. I had confessed yet had not been wholly honest, and I was still lying. I was renewing the worst offence by revisiting, frequently, the photographs that Sam had given me. Only after several months had passed did I destroy them.
For weeks I was as bad as an alcoholic with his half-bottle of Scotch hidden in the toilet cistern. Whenever the opportunity arose I would go up into the roof and take the pictures down from the cranny in which I’d taken to hiding them – in an angle of the rafters, at the far end of the loft. Sometimes I would stay up there for an hour or more, holding the photos under the glare of the lightbulb, putting the same questions to them over and over again: what had happened, and why had it happened? Often, though, I wasn’t asking any questions at all – I was urging the photographs to transmit something more of the life they recorded, something more than the surfaces of these particular moments of my past. When I looked at the photograph of Sarah by the gate, frequently I thought of sex. Being in bed with the woman in this picture had been thrilling, I told myself, but it was as though I were reciting a piece of information, like a label attached to a souvenir. I had desired her too much, and yet when I tried to imagine the body that I’d desired all I could retrieve was a barely perceptible glimmering of sensation – a micro-measure of pleasure, as dilute as a homeopathic dose. Sarah could be funny – I knew this to be true of her, almost as you would know it to be true of a character in a book that you read many years ago. I could call to mind two occasions on which she had made me laugh – only two. In fact, I could barely remember anything that she’d said to me. Our last argument was the most substantial relic; a few disconnected phrases remained from the other days; the rest had gone.
When I looked at the photographs, whatever life they gave off was like the gleam emitted by a torch’s bulb as the last of the battery’s power gave out. The images became inert in my hands, and I was left, every time, with the most prosaic thoughts repeating themselves in my head, as tenaciously as advertising jingles: Sarah was dead and before long I would be dead too; how many years have passed since then, so quickly. I would return downstairs and Aileen would come home, and then I would become myself again.
I threw the pictures away and was pleased with myself for having done so. I felt better now that they were no longer hidden in the house. I tried not to think about Sarah, and was soon managing, nearly always, to delete the thought of her as soon as it appeared to me. And yet, while I largely succeeded in banishing the image of Sarah from my mind, I was still prey, from time to time, to a kind of nostalgia, but a nostalgia that has nothing real as its object. This is the case even now. The affair with Sarah sometimes enters my mind as something much vaguer than an image, as vague as an aura, and an aura that has nothing to do with the facts as I remember them. I don’t know how to describe it. In a way, it’s like what you see when a bright white light is abruptly extinguished – shapes and colours that are not the shapes and colours of the objects that were in the light. The affair with Sarah was no great romance; it was squalid, and I regret it profoundly. Nonetheless, the idea of it sometimes brings to me a sense of having once experienced a relationship of unusual depths, of having
lost something of value. There are moments in which I wonder if this sense might be the product of submerged memories of things that my waking mind has forgotten. I am as certain as I can be that this is not true. This nostalgia, for want of a better word, is baseless and ridiculous. It is a fiction, yet I cannot rid myself of it.
Throughout the year that followed Sam’s appearance, a fume of dissatisfaction would envelop me from time to time. This perhaps is inevitable, at my stage of life. Before Sam, however, I was satisfied with my life, generally; more than most people are, I suspect. Sometimes it felt as if Sam had detached me not just from Aileen but from myself. At work my mind wandered. It wanders still. Occasionally I find myself thinking about Sam, or about Sarah. More often, I’m thinking of nothing – I simply become unfocused, and find it difficult to hold on to any train of thought. I feel older than I should, as though the events of that summer have added a decade to me. I have bouts of boredom, which never used to happen before, not at work. And when I look up from my desk, I sometimes catch sight of my reflection in the glass wall opposite, and it’s like looking at a photograph that you might see in a magazine article on the sterility of modern life. I have glanced at my reflection and been struck by the dismal comedy of it – all that well-ordered space, all those well-designed objects, with one ageing male face in the midst of it, making a mess of the arrangement.
The TV company sent me a DVD of the interview with Otis Mizrahi. I watched it with Aileen. ‘You come across well,’ she said, and it’s true that they’d done a good job with me: the camera angles flattered me and the editing made me eloquent. But the programme presented me as someone whose career had followed precisely the course I had chosen for it: as a young man I had decided that I must bring the best of modern design to the attention of the British public, and I had achieved this ambition, with not inconsiderable commercial success. This falsehood was not solely the creation of the programme makers – I had been complicit in it. It would have been truer to say that what I’d wanted to do more than anything else was to design and make furniture but I had failed at that, and had become a salesman because it had seemed to be the next best thing. As for the commercial success, good fortune and good advice, much of it from Aileen, had been as significant as my supposed flair and vision, but flair and vision were the key terms in the programme’s vocabulary, and I’d been happy to play the part. Listening to myself talking to Otis, watching myself as my hands shaped in air the perfect contours of my favourite lamp, I asked myself how this person should be described. ‘Smug’ wasn’t quite the right adjective, but perhaps that was only because of the worry that Sam had put into me. Had the programme been made a couple of months sooner, ‘smug’ might very well have fitted perfectly. As it was, this was certainly a man who was too comfortable in his life, and a man it would not be difficult to dislike. I threw the DVD away, at the same time as the pictures of Sarah.
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